Walking.

• Author: Espada, Martin
• Position: Poem

For Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

I go two steps closer, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I'll never reach her. What good is utopia? That's what: It's good for walking .

--Eduardo Galeano

You walked alone, away from the city writhing in flames and jellied gasoline, away from the canisters of napalm dropped by your bombardier's hands, away from medals and ribbons stuffed in a folder with the words never again ; walking the backroads in a country of Confederate flags, shoes baked in mud, shuffling on the picket line with dark-skinned sharecroppers, teachers, organizers who hungered for the ballot box and sang all night to keep their jailers awake; walking with apparitions, the escaped slave reading the compass of the moon between the trees, the anarchist in spectacles who made of the crowd a roaring sea, the union man on trial for subversion of the draft, who confessed the crime and told the judge with open hands: while there is a soul in prison, I am not free; walking through the metal detectors of courthouses and airports, smuggling manifestos in your head from the slave, the anarchist, the unionist, words freed asa magician frees doves flown to the rafters from the great stage of the world; walking through schoolrooms, the smooth oval of faces tilted up, astonished by your words as they floated down like parachutes of milkweed on the wind; walking by the river with the fugitive poet-priest who sang of the risen bread , as agents of the government hunted for the poet...